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Sunday, 29 January 2017

No, Torture Doesn’t “Work”

Donald Trump said in a new interview that torture “works”.But the Guardian notes:

On Wednesday, Steve Kleinman, a retired air force colonel and senior adviser to the FBI-led team that interrogates terrorist suspects warned that weakening US prohibitions against torture was dangerous and ignorant.

“A lot of these people who weigh in heavily on interrogation have no idea how little they know, [and do so] because of what they see on television,” said Kleinman, chairman of the research advisory committee to the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG).

“There is, at best, anecdotal evidence to support torture,” said Kleinman, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the HIG.

“There is, on the other hand, a robust body of scientific literature and field testing that demonstrates the efficacy of a relationship-based, rapport-based, cognitive-based approach to interrogation, as well as a robust literature that would suggest torture immediately undermines a source’s ability to be a reliable reporter of information: memory is undermined, judgment is undermined, decision-making is undermined, time-references are undermined. And this is only from a purely operational perspective; we can’t take the morality out of strategy.”***McCain referenced explicit guarantees from Pompeo and Mattis during their Senate confirmation proceedings to follow the interrogations law and the army field manual. “I am confident these leaders will be true to their word,” McCain said.The former CIA head Leon Panetta, who gave the orders to close the agency’s black sites told the BBC that it would be a “mistake” to reintroduce enhanced interrogation techniques and “damaging” to the reputation of the US. Panetta said torture was violation of the US values and the constitution.